Tag

urban politics

“Indonesia will build a new capital city on the island of Borneo, home to some of the world’s biggest coal reserves and orangutan habitats, as President Joko Widodo seeks to ease pressure on congested and sinking Jakarta. The relocation of the capital, some 1,400km away from Jakarta, will help spread economic activity outside the nation’s most populous island of Java.”

Controlling borders and territory were the main factors in geopolitics for centuries. In his bookConnectography by Parag Khanna, he argues that connectivity and networks are more important today. The world’s most connected cities act in ways that transcend political boundaries.

“Cities are mankind’s most enduring and stable mode of social organization, outlasting all empires and nations over which they have presided. Today cities have become the world’s dominant demographic and economic clusters.”

This map is a sneak peek preview from the new book Connectography by Parag Khanna. This main point of the book and article is that economic and social connectivity is the new driving force is of geopolitics, not just global economics. Supply chains matter more than borders and the largest cities are the controlling nodes of those supply chains.